Car auction a metal meat market

A Pontiac GTO on the auction block at the 2012 Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Ariz.

PHOTO: File, handout

People stand near the first 2013 Corvette 427 Convertible, VIN #0001, on the auction block where it sold to the highest bidder for $600,000 at the Barrett-Jackson collector car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, January 21, 2012. Chevrolet and Hendrick Motorsports teamed up for the auction, with four-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion Jeff Gordon and team owner Rick Hendrick, to raise a total of $700,000 for the AARP's Drive to End Hunger charity.

PHOTO: Paul Morton / Chevrolet, handout

The sad side to Barrett-Jackson

By David Booth, Postmedia News

Originally published: January 26, 2012

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Phoenix, Ariz. • I am not sure the good folks at Barrett-Jackson will appreciate the association, but, in person, the world’s most famous car auction feels a lot like the Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel that was forced into our hotel room TVs by HBO’s Cathouse: The Series. Oh, for sure, the Barrett-Jackson playground literally dwarfs the BunnyRanch that always looked as if it was a bunch of double-wides thrown together. And, certainly, the money changing hands at Barrett-Jackson is off the charts; the purported US$100-million that customers plunked down for their lead sleds would require the girls at Las Vegas’s Ranch to work some serious overtime.

Of this, however, there can be no doubt — both are meat markets. The BunnyRanch, of course, is up front about it. A man (well, usually a man) walks in the front door fresh from winning at the casino/getting off an oil rig/promising his wife he will behave in Las Vegas, and plumps down money for what, in any other jurisdiction, would be an illegal act. On the other hand, the Barrett-Jackson, viewed — as I had always have taken it in previously — appeared to be a classy affair. After all, the cars shown on TV were phantasmagorical and the amount of money changing hands — always the primary way success is judged — bordered on the outrageous. Besides, the auctioneer wears a tux and strides atop a podium. Surely, this has to be a classy affair.

Up close and personal though, it’s tawdry. Wander on to the stage during one of the earlier days when the more pedestrian (that should be read cheaper) auctions take place and the event really does feel like a cheap trick arguing with one of the girls over the cost of you know what; it’s a veritable cattle call of automotive chrome. Just like those working girls lining up for the prospective clients at the Ranch, cars have as little as 45 seconds on stage to impress prospective clients. And, just like those ladies of the evening back in Nevada, the car’s owners are encouraged to flout their boobies, excuse me, engines as provocatively as possible. In fact, most of the cheaper cars arrive on stage with their hoods and trunks already released so that they may be stripped bare in as little time as possible. Hell, sometimes the producers demand a look “under the skirt,” the cameras, just as at the BunnyRanch, probing underneath the product where most of us never look. Then — and this happens a lot more frequently than appears on TV — if the car fails to excite the crowd, it’s less than ceremoniously hustled off the stage. Indeed, on the Wednesday night I attended, about five AC Cobras (or replicas) appeared on stage in quick succession. So bored was the audience that the last car barely hit $30,000 before being bum-rushed into the parking lot — this despite the auctioneer’s best efforts to build its provenance by claiming baseball legend Reggie Jackson once sat in its front seat. (And you thought that BunnyRanch owner Dennis Hof’s attempts to build up Sunset Thomas’s price tag by noting she starred in Misty Beethoven: The Musical was pathetic).

Just like in houses of ill repute, the casual workers at the Barrett-Jackson auction look as though they’d like to be anywhere else. Just as no one in a strip club is more bored than the poor DJ who has to announce “and straight from the outskirts of upper Hamilton, let’s give a big round of applause for Anita Job” five times every night, the poor guys shuffling cars on stage looked bored out of their minds. Ditto the guys polishing the gleaming chrome. You would have thought they were waxing an ’85 K-car for all their enthusiasm.

This, perhaps, leads to the most dispiriting part of the Barrett-Jackson auction. Wander the vast staging areas and almost every one of the 1,300-plus cars on the block this year was a fastidiously assembled, meticulously painted (if sometimes garish) rendition of a classic automobile. And, just as we are repeatedly reminded (or, sadly, have to be reminded) that sex trade workers are human beings with the same ambitions, hopes and aspirations as the rest of us, most of the cars on sale here were, at one point in time, someone’s dream car — with parts to be sourced, long hours of dirty, thankless restoration and, most of all, hard-earned money spent on something that can never be recouped.

Yes, a few sellers, especially those auctioning off rare and collectible vintage rides, might have made a profit. And, yes, the Barrett-Jackson auction was a veritable playground for the automotive voyeur. But, just as one can’t help but think working at the BunnyRanch is the last rung on the ladder of broken dreams, watching all those pretty cars being churned over like so much scrap metal just made me sad.